Modern electronic design automation (EDA) tools are devised to communicate design intent and the circuit behavior between a circuit designer and other technical personnel such as design team member. With the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubling approximately every two years according to the Moore's law, contemporary electronic designs have become increasingly bigger and more complex over time. Verification or simulation is often performed to determine whether an electronic design performs as intended. Due to the ever increasing complexity of modern electronic designs, verification or simulation of an electronic design rarely leads to an error-free design and thus may require further debugging.
Conventional approaches present a challenge that requires many manual, tedious tasks to chase a signal that exhibits a particular value in a specific clock cycle. This challenge is further exacerbated when an electronic design includes complex logic that leads from one node to a plurality of nodes, some of which may further branch off to even more nodes. Therefore, a user of these conventional approaches is often presented with cluttered pieces of information deeply within which the information corresponding to the actual cause of signal exhibiting the particular value in the specific clock cycle is buried. For example, in response to a command to show the driver for a particular signal-cycle pair, conventional approaches may nevertheless present a plurality of candidate drivers that may contribute to the particular signal-cycle pair but may not necessarily do so in the specific clock cycle. The user is thus required to sift through such cluttered pieces of information, hoping that the answer can be identified before the user is disoriented by these cluttered pieces of information.
Therefore, there exists a need for a method, system, and computer program product for graph-driven verification and debugging of electronic designs with a debug graph and optionally a schematic view that may be generated on the fly in response to an identification of a signal-cycle pair.